


An Equal and Opposite Reaction

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Broken Bones, Choking, F/M, Face Punching, Face Slapping, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Interrogation, Nipple Torture, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-05
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-02-07 12:57:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1899828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knows a lot of ways to hurt her without drawing a drop of blood. She knows a lot of ways to strike back with words alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Equal and Opposite Reaction

**Author's Note:**

> [Kinkmeme prompt](http://snkkink.dreamwidth.org/8414.html?thread=8039646#cmt8039646) (my own). Originally I specified “subtextual UST that is never spelled out,” but I ended up spelling it out somewhat.

_She’s smaller than I thought she’d be._

He’s no sooner formed the thought than the irony strikes him hard. How many people have said that to him, in the second person instead of the third? How many times has his response been to gaze up at them and make them quail, their not considering at all how much worse it is to be on his side of that gaze?

She stands seven centimeters shorter than he does, and now she’s seated. He’s on his feet, and he towers over her. But, with eyes only slightly less pale than his own, she looks up at him with an uninterested deadness he has not seen since he left the Underground City. Not even on the most traumatized of Survey Corpsmen. Not even in the mirror.

He refuses to let himself consider how much worse it must be to gaze out of her eyes than to look upon them.

Woven about her and her chair is a formidable web of steel restraints, chains and shackles and even wires. They’re capped off by steel gloves, and steel shoes with divisions for her toes, to keep her from digging her nails into her own flesh. Every fourth day, she’s released from this network of steel and clapped into conventional fetters, then marched to a tub full of warm water and harsh soap. She’s forcibly scrubbed and all her nails clipped to the quick, fresh clothes are pulled onto her, and she’s returned to her prison-chair. His nose wrinkles; this must be day three.

Levi closes the door behind him, then turns back to her. Almost conversationally, he says, “I won’t bother with an introduction. I presume you know who I am.”

“Haven’t the faintest clue, really,” Annie Leonhardt drawls, her voice thickened by the bridle. There’s no change to her expression.

Levi backhands her. Her head doesn’t fly backward because a thick pillow has been fixed between it and the wall, but it tilts upward somewhat. The mark of his hand darkens on her cheekbone, then begins to evaporate immediately. The hairs on the nape of his neck rise.

She blinks a few times, then fixes her gaze on him again. It’s changed from profound lack of interest to scorn, and one corner of her mouth has lifted. “‘Humanity’s Strongest,’” she says. She manages to lather the words with irony, though her consonants are muffled and warped by thin layers of a flexible yet tough material over her teeth, permitting her to speak and be understood but not to bite herself.

Hange, who created the material in her lab, also figured out how to crack Annie’s titan chrysalis open. Then she and Moblit admitted Annie as the second-ever patient of the Survey Corps’ unauthorized dental clinic. But there was no point to pulling teeth that would grow back immediately. Instead they drilled holes in her canines and back molars, then threaded thin straps of the new material through them and tied them off. Annie twitched in her restraints, they told Levi, but after weeks of light deprivation she was too weak to cry out, let alone struggle. Since then the holes have closed up around the straps, and she’s been carried outdoors a few times in the chair and restraints so that she can regain enough strength to answer questions.

Levi stifles a hard look into an impassive one. She doesn’t need the leverage of knowing that he detests the epithet by which she just addressed him. “Correct,” he says flatly.

The other corner of her mouth rises. “Of all the people to enjoy beating defenseless girls.”

He stares incredulously at her. “Temporarily ‘defenseless girls’ who have killed hundreds, nearly thousands, of people? Including four who were like family to me? Yeah, I enjoy that quite a bit, actually.” Without pausing a single beat he slaps her on the opposite cheek, using the full force of his hand now. It takes her a few more seconds and a few more blinks to regain her equilibrium.

“Is that the sort of patent bullshit you used on Eren?” he asks. “Because you might as well save it. You’re not dealing with a lovestruck teenager with no concern for his own safety.” He’s gratified to see that the stain of blood under her skin is lingering longer this time, its eerie vanishing act a little slower.

“For what it’s worth,” Annie says as if she’s about to mention that it’s supposed to rain tomorrow or that he has a wine stain on his cravat, “it didn’t work on Eren, either. Do you always underestimate him like that?”

“If I was the one who underestimated him, not you, you wouldn’t be here.” Then he catches himself. Why is he letting her put him on the defensive?

He leans forward, grabs a hank of her pale hair — unkempt and unwashed, it soils his hand with scalp grease — and jerks her head up. Riveting her eyes with his, he says, “I know a lot of ways to hurt you without drawing a drop of blood. You’ll want to answer my questions honestly and thoroughly, without any attitude.”

She says nothing, just stares coldly at him, though her eyes are starting to glisten from the painful pull on her scalp. He holds her gaze for a long while before he tells himself the moment has been extended ludicrously beyond the making of any possible point, and he shoves her head backward as he releases her hair. He resists the powerful urge to pull out a handkerchief and wipe his hand clean. As soon as her head bobs back into place and she’s blinked away the tears, she resumes the glacial gaze.

“Where were you going to take Eren?” Levi asks.

Annie doesn’t reply, and her unchanged expression indicates she’s not gathering any words for him.

He digs his fingernails into her right earlobe and twists it viciously, calibrating the force of both his nails and his entire hand so as to stop just short of tearing the cartilage. Other than that her breath has begun to rasp through her nostrils, she remains silent. After about a minute, he grabs her other earlobe and twists it the same way. A touch of wetness glimmers between her pale lashes and the slopes of her cheekbones, and there’s a tremor at the left corner of her mouth. But she continues to say nothing.

Four minutes pass before he releases her lobes. She catches her breath, quietly but with a razor-sharpness, and opens her eyes. Her pupils are minuscule islets in seas of ice. She snarls, though the effect is spoiled by the black sheathing, which makes her look as though she’s lost every tooth in her mouth. He wishes he could actually make that happen with the pliers Hange used on Sanes.

“Reiner Braun and Bertholdt Hoover,” he says.

“What about them?” He expected her voice to be hostile, but it’s returned to the apathetic flatness of earlier.

“Did you know them before you entered the 104th Trainees Class?” He knows the answer, of course. He’s read all their dossiers; he’s asked his current squad for whatever they could tell him about these three; he’s grilled Eren and Historia for every last detail of that final encounter after the fall of Castle Utgard.

“Yeah. We grew up in the same village.” It’s the answer he expected. She’s not stupid enough to lie about something she knows can so easily be checked.

“Do you know where they and Ymir might be hiding?”

She raises her brows slightly. “I’ve been in a state of suspended animation for weeks, remember? The last time I saw them they were all still with the Survey Corps. And nobody here tells me anything.”

Levi’s hand flies out again, cracking hard against Annie’s left cheekbone, then the right, then the left again. She coughs and gasps, eyes tearing up again, before she raises her head and straightens her spine so that she can continue to glare at him.

“Let’s try that again,” he says calmly. “If you had to _guess_ where Reiner, Bertholdt, and Ymir might be hiding, where would it be?”

“Our village,” she spits as the marks of his hand dwindle away. “Which you could have figured out already and probably have. And they wouldn’t be ‘hiding’ there. They’d be _living_ there. Do you understand the difference between those two states of existence? Or has a century of scurrying behind high walls wiped away that distinction collectively for humanity?”

He glares down at her. Through the crimson fog of hatred he notes that, if nothing else, he’s roused emotion in her. Anger and contempt. Even better leverage than pain for getting someone to talk.

“What sort of life would they be ‘living’ there, then?” he demands.

Her scorn cools visibly but doesn’t wane. “What do you think? It’s a rural village. It’s getting toward winter. They have animals to be slaughtered, food to be put up, fences to be repaired, fields to be plowed over. When people aren’t working, they’re mostly sleeping or eating. When they have time for fun they spend it drinking and fucking. I thought even fools from the city would know these things.”

That’s a lot of words, he thinks, that went into not answering the question she had to know he was asking. He changes tack. “Did you know before the Battle of Trost that Eren was a titan shifter?”

“No.” The word seems just slightly, ever so slightly, too quickly spoken.

“You sparred with him extensively. Do you mean to tell me you never noticed his elevated body temperature, or that any wounds you dealt him healed immediately?”

Annie blinks slowly, her mouth twitching in an imminent smirk, and drawls, “I suppose you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

Levi sets his hands on her neck, gently at first, the way you’d steady a lover before you sucked a dark circle into the hollow of their throat. Instead he presses his thumbs and forefingers inward, harder and harder, constricting her trachea. 

Annie’s eyes widen, the sclera swallowing up the chips of blue ice. After ninety seconds, the first hint of cyan begins to appear in her cheeks and lips. At the three-minute mark Levi pulls his hands away. Annie wheezes and rales, hauling down lungfuls of air. He watches the dark impressions of his fingertips fade from her throat, along with the clammy shade of blue.

After a minute she says, “For what it’s worth, I wasn’t lying.” Her voice is a croak but her tone is not much different from before. 

“You lied by omission, you little piece of trash. But I’m feeling generous so I’ll reword the question: Did you _suspect_ before Trost that Eren was a titan shifter?”

“Yes,” she says. He can’t imagine why she’d say so if it weren’t true.

“Did you train him in hand-to-hand combat in the hope you could sway him to your side once he knew of his powers?”

“I took an interest in Eren long before I had any inkling of his powers.”

He notes that she’s again not answering his question, but instead of informing her of that he asks, “Why? Because you wanted to fuck him?”

“Because I admired him, which I still do, and I wanted to teach him what I could. Funny you should immediately jump to the conclusion you did. Telling, as well.”

He’s not going to dignify that with a reply, verbal or violent. “Did you know before the fall of Castle Utgard that he was a coordinate for other titans?”

“No,” she says. The inert syllable yields up no clues as to her truthfulness, nor does her face.

“Do you know the Ape Titan?”

She blinks owlishly at him. “The what titan?”

Levi thrusts his right arm under Annie’s left armpit, brings his hand up and over her shoulder, and wrenches downward as hard and as far as her web of steel will permit him. He can both hear and feel the pop of the dislocation. She goes wax-white, eyes bulging again, but she doesn’t even gasp. He steps back.

“The bearded titan, the one who can speak to humans in full sentences. How many fucking titans meet that description, you lying sack of murdering shit? There can’t be a huge society of them out beyond the Walls, can there?”

As soon as the last question is out of his mouth, he realizes it could be much less rhetorical than he assumed.

“I’ve _met_ him,” she grates out. “That’s all.”

“Do you know who he is in human form?”

“No.”

He’s not entirely sure she doesn’t know the Ape Titan beyond mere acquaintance, but he’s starting to get a fix for Annie Leonhardt’s place in the grand scheme of titanhood. Not a very high place.

Still, she knows things she’s not saying, things he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have the questions for yet. Brute force, he suspects, won’t drag them out of her. Words might. Levi doesn’t traffic in lofty speeches like Erwin Smith, or in complex rhetoric like Armin Arlert. But he’s always been eloquent enough for his own purposes.

“I’ll give you this,” he says. “You take pain well. Better than any number of grown men.”

“I suppose you’d know,” she says waspishly.

“I suppose I would,” he allows, pretending not to pick up on the dig, “after six years in the Survey Corps.” Let her work a little harder to get under his skin. Let _him_ work a little harder at not letting her, for that matter. “How did you learn to take it? Most trainees never do, not to that degree.”

She shrugs her good shoulder. The unnatural jut of bone out of the other one is already receding beneath her shirt. “Life is pain.”

He seldom wants to laugh, but he wants to now. “That’s precious, coming from a sixteen-year-old to someone twice her age. And with considerably broader life experience.”

She doesn’t reply to that, but her eyes chill again with scorn. He heard similar words from Kaney when he was her age, if less condescending and more profane, and he reacted more or less identically to them. Kaney punched him so hard in the jaw for that that Levi staggered backward across the room, hit the opposite wall, and slid down it. He’s had to react similarly once or twice with the rare recruit unquelled by his glare. But he doesn’t think mere adolescent hubris is worth that much effort right now, not with this particular adolescent.

“How much do you know about how and why the titans were created?”

“Nothing,” Annie says. “Absolutely nothing.” It’s not blatant, but he can hear contempt in her voice cracking like a whip. Contempt for him? For humanity? For whoever set her on this path since before the age of twelve?

“You sound angry about that,” he muses, hoping to fan that emotion once again. He gets no response. He stares at her a little longer, then continues. “I suppose that if I’d been trained from a tender age to become a killing machine and nobody told me why — nobody warned me I’d grow fond of some of the people I was destined to kill — I’d be angry, too.”

He gets the impression it’s taking an ungodly amount of strength on her part not to roll her eyes at him. Finally she says, “The irony of that, coming from you.”

He shrugs. “I take down titans well. I do so in service to humanity. Who do _you_ serve, Annie Leonhardt?”

Her lips curl back again, and saliva gleams wet on the ugly black sheathing of the bridle. “You forget, don’t you, that I was in the Military Police for a short while? Where I had access to criminal records? I looked up that of every single Survey Corps officer still alive. Including you.”

The adrenaline cuts through him icy hot, making his heart pound just once but painfully and the hairs on his nape lift again.

“I was impressed, I’ll admit,” Annie continues. “You’re a suspect in nineteen murders, dozens of acts of extortionist violence, and innumerable armed robberies and burglaries. Yet you never faced any formal charges other than for a few fights and petty thefts when you were my age and younger, never any penalties beyond an MP smacking you around or, twice, a public whipping, and you hid from extrajudicial punishment in places where MPs won’t go. If Erwin Smith hadn’t blackmailed you into the Survey Corps you’d never have killed a single titan. Your pretense to moral superiority over me is” — she draws the last two words out slowly — “ _fucking hilarious._ ”

Some demon with ice-cold breath has assumed residence in his belly, sucking all his viscera into its frigid maw. He declines to give into the sensation and moves forward, fist clenched; as he drives it into her ribs there’s a savagely satisfying crack, followed by a hoarse wheeze from Annie. As he draws back he can feel titan heat radiating off her, as if pursuing him. He knows the rib is reknitting itself already, though a broken bone will take her system longer than a dislocated one to mend. Certainly longer than bruises on her flesh.

“So,” he says, returning to a conversational tone. “Indulge my curiosity. Is it _only_ childhood brainwashing with you? Reiner and Bertholdt have killed a shit-ton of people, but they didn’t seem to take as much … joy, I suppose, in it as you did. Downright creative, you are. Twirling human beings around like party favors. Cutting out their napes the way we cut out those of titans. Crushing them against trees.” There’s a bitter taste rising up from his throat; he chokes it back down.

“I keep my promises,” she says, voice tight with pain.

“To whom?”

“To my father.”

He raises his brows. “Meaning what?”

A new grin forms around her huffed-out words. “Oh. Of course. Why would the get of an Underground whore understand that sort of familial bond? For you the word ‘father’ connotes nothing more than a stain on your mother’s skirts, yes?”

He stares at her for a moment in disbelief before he’s in motion, not really thinking about what he’s doing. His left hand clamps onto her left shoulder, which hasn’t finished healing, and as she winces he plunges his right hand down the front of her shirt. 

Unlike her titan breasts, her human breasts are small, half-flat things. He makes a circle of his fingers and wrenches the left one within it. Her face goes white, possibly more with shock than with pain, and a bead of sweat forms at her hairline. He closes his fingers around the nipple and twists it the way he did her earlobes.

She looks up at him in incredulous inquiry. Then she starts to laugh. Damn her, she _laughs_ , and it’s a surprisingly deep, corrosive sound.

“Fucking _pervert._ What sorts of things did you do in the Underground that the MPs _didn’t_ find out about?”

He doesn’t reply but finds her other nipple — it’s hard, he realizes, though he can’t tell if it’s arousal or just a random physiological reaction — and all but snaps it off her breast. 

Her eyes bulge again, then roll back up to his face, brightly hateful. “Sucks for you that you can’t risk taking me out of the restraints, doesn’t it? Sure, I’m a little ripe right now, and I hear you’re neurotic about shit like that. Still. ‘Ways to hurt me without drawing a drop of blood.’ You’d get me just wet enough for that, wouldn’t you? Then you’d convince yourself later it was one more way to ‘serve humanity.’”

He twists harder. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Yeah, like I can’t see the front of your trousers from here, liar.” She’s wheezing like an old woman with pneumonia, but the thin wind of her voice is shot through with gleeful malice. “Did you do this to Eren, too? I heard what you did to him at his tribunal. I know how you had him chained up every night afterward. People talk, Captain. They _speculate._ ”

The word is a serpent slithering out from between her lips. He briefly, very briefly, visualizes his cock between them, shutting her up. Then he wonders if he’s lost his goddamn mind. The bridle prevents biting, not blunt pressure exerted by jaws.

“So tell me,” she grinds out from behind that blunt pressure, from between teeth compressing thick, chewy layers made of chemicals between them. “You and I both know Eren soaks up pain like a sponge. Believe it or not, my only knowledge of that is through sparring with him. How about you? Does _he_ go in for nipple torture? How about the cock-and-ball sort?”

He just stares at her in disbelief again, loosening his grasp on her nipple. She’s not rambling in the slightest, in pain or otherwise. The stream of obscene speculation that pours forth from her would be crisply articulated were it not for the bridle. Her eyes are lit not only with loathing but with a lively curiosity, as if each word she utters is the dart of a heated needle beneath his fingernails, the torque of pliers around his teeth.

“Do you have to shove more than one finger up his ass these days before he’ll take that diseased toothpick you call a cock?” she goes on. “Did you teach him how to suck it, too? Has he learned to cover his teeth properly, or do you just slap one of these bridles on him first? Do you knock him around if he doesn’t swallow?”

“You mean like this?”

He can just feel the edges of her teeth under the sheathing when he drives his fist into her face. But for the oncoming bruise, her profile is stark and bloodless against the off-white of the pillowcase, her eyes closed, her nostrils flaring. Her jaw works convulsively; he’s never seen a punch there cause muscle spasms before, but who the fuck knows how a titan’s nervous system works.

In the ensuing silence Levi realizes he’s breathing fast and shallow. There’s a sourness congealing in his stomach, and every hair he possesses feels like it’s standing on end. He’s still hard, but that happens in combat. Not only when he thinks about Eren Jaeger in ways he’s never mentioned to anyone else. Those thoughts will henceforth be ruined with the additions of bridles and implements of torture, with the image of himself slapping Eren for choking on his come.

He didn’t already hate Annie Leonhardt enough for the universe’s tastes, apparently.

After an eternity, her head turns back forward. The bruise is already fading. Her gaze is weirdly serene, otherworldly. Maybe the punch scrambled something in her head, even with the pillow behind it.

“Did you have anything else you wanted to ask me?” Her voice sounds different. Did he break her jaw? He devoutly hopes so.

“For the moment, no,” he says curtly. He’s started to count down the minutes until he’s in a steaming hot shower, scrubbing the blot of her off his hand, off his brain. “Why? Did you have anything else you wanted to tell me?”

Her lips part. He’s seen precisely that grin before, in the Forest of Giant Trees. But back in the forest there was no trickle of blood on her lips, and her teeth were entirely exposed. Rather than partly exposed behind a ragged, torn strip of flexible sheathing.

“Yeah. You lose,” Annie says, and the stone of the ceiling splinters like wood around her head as she explodes upward.


End file.
